I’d forgotten that the 20 year-old Muhammad Ali (initially known as Cassius Clay) had a fast cameo in Rod Serling‘s Requiem for a Heavyweight(’62).

Directed by Ralph Nelson, pic was a critically respected adaptation of the televized Playhouse 90 version, which Serling originated and produced in ‘1956.

Serling and Nelson won Emmy Awards for the ’56 version. Nelson also directed the multi-Oscar-nominated Lillies of the Field (’63) and Charly (’68).

I’ve never seen a kinescope of the ’56, but the writing in the feature version is exceptional — concise, bitter, eloquent, surprisingly emotional at times.

Produced by David Susskind, Requiem for a Heavyweight is free to watch on YouTube.

I prefer Wolfies because it sounds flip and irreverent — a title you can repeat to your friends with a slight grin on your face.

I really don’t like saying Wolfs.

The tone is deadpan sardonic — flirting with dark comedy without actually going there. This might be okay.

Harry Cohn, the willful, manipulative, deeply loathed honcho of Columbia Pictures, died of a heart attack on 2.27.58. He was 66 years old. An “extravagant” funeral service was held in stage 12 on the Columbia Studios lot. Almost the entire Hollywood community attended. Famous observation from Red Skelton, one of the mourners: “It proves what Harry always said — give the public what they want and they’ll come out for it.”

Posted on 7.5.17: I was taking in the splendor of old Hollywood yesterday, and more specifically the Mediterranean-style Crescent Drive mansion where Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn lived from 1946 until his death in ’58.

I swear to God I felt Harry hovering nearby, or at least a spectral remnant. “Who the hell are you?” Cohn’s ghost said. “I’m Jeffrey Wells, samurai poet columnist,” I replied, “and one of the few guys in this town who remembers you and even mentions you from time to time so show a little respect.” The ectoplasmic Cohn grumbled as he floated away, heading for the pool area.

All my life I’ve read that Cohn was a crass, tyrannical bully-boss, grudgingly “respected” but feared and most certainly despised.

Screenwriter Ben Hecht famously referred to Cohn as “White Fang.” Like other studio chiefs of his day Cohn had a quid pro quo relationship with mob guys, was something of a racist thug (“The Kid in the Middle“, a BBC doc, reports that Cohn had goons threaten Sammy Davis, Jr. over his relationship with Kim Novak), reportedly hastened the death of poor Curly Howard (the woo-woo guy with The Three Stooges) and of course was always trying to fuck the hottest actresses.

Harry Cohn lived here (1000 No. Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills) between 1946 and ’58.

The plural of hippopotamus is hippopotami**, right? What’s the plural of moose? Meese, I think. What’s the plural of wolf? The last time I checked, it was wolves.

If my windshield wipers start making that irritating glass-squeak noise, I don’t even think about it — they’re instantly shut off. What kind of twerp lets that sound continue?

Wolfs synopsis: “Two illiterate professional fixers find themselves hired for the same job.” In this context I’m presuming that the word “illiterate” means “dumb guy” or “vaguely out-to-lunch guy,” and man, that really goes hard against the Clooney-Pitt legend.

** pronounced “Hippopotam-eye” or “Hippopotamy” as in “my, oh my.”

“But I never made it. But in that era it was JFK, it was Muhammud Ali, it was Sean Connery, Howard Cosell…you can go all down the list…that’s a real man. I want to be like that someday.” — Jerry Seinfeld during q & a sitdown with Bari Weiss, posted this morning.

Back in the day the world was overflowing with classic masculinity and noblesse oblige right-stuff role models…slender physiques, handsome features, big white teeth, debonair vibes, wealth and self-assurance.

Eternal smoothie Cary Grant was my favorite rich uncle from the time I began watching his black-and-white films on the tube until he aged out and retired in the mid ’60s.

Burt Lancaster, James Garner, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, Steve McQueen, 1950s horse-cock tenor Frank Sinatra, Alain Delon, Jean Paul Belmondo, young Marlon Brando…loved those guys with all my heart. They were the gold standard of my tweener and early teen years..

I grew up in a world in which conventionally attractive or semi-attractive people were the ones who got laid the most often. Trust me — I used to do quite well at the Westport Players Tavern in the mid to late ’70s, and I had a good sense of what worked and what didn’t.

Posted on 2.11.15: “Standards of hotness change over time. I’ve said more than a few times that sexual attractiveness standards have definitely evolved in favor of the notties over the last…oh, 10 or 12 years. We’re now living in an age, partly if not largely perpetrated by the films and scenarios of producer-director Judd Apatow, in which Schlumpies and Dumpies have been sold to the public as the kind of people you want to go out with, go home with, get married to, etc.

“When I was in my 20s and carousing around Schlumpies and Dumpies got no action whatsoever. They stayed home, watched TV, wept in their beds, jerked off, etc. But today they make out.

“If a bearded guy in an Apatow movie has bigger breasts than Cameron Diaz and a dumpy milky-white body with eight or nine pimples on his fat white ass…cool! If a lead actress looks like one of the Andrews Sisters but with somewhat wider or heavier facial features…crazy mama!”

Don’t kid yourself — one of the social factors behind the horrific likelihood that Donald Trump is going to win the November election…one of these factors was clumsily and unspecifically alluded to last weekend by Richard Dreyfuss, to wit: “We have no knowledge of who the hell we are, and if we don’t get it back soon we’re all gonna die. And you all know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Dreyfuss isn’t Nostradamus, but he’s voicing a popular rage that HE commentariat progressives don’t want to know about. But if The Beast wins, there will be no alternatives open to HE denialists except to gaze into their bathroom mirrors. The rage is out there, and it’s not going away. I can’t quite believe this is happening in this country, but it is and God help us.

It’s the Withered Old Joe thing plus wokester loathing among regular voters…

Filed earlier today by Politico‘s Christopher Cadelago, Sally Goldenberg and Elena Schneider:

[Go to 7:10 mark] Robert DeNiro to MAGA Doubting Thomas during this morning’s downtown press conference: “I don’t know how to deal with you, my friend. These guys [Jan. 6th Capitol defenders standing behind him] stood there and fought…for you, for you!” When the naysayer says “they weren’t fighting for me,” DeNiro responds, “They fought for you, buddy…you’re able to stand here now.”

I’ve never seen Paul Bartel‘s Cannonball (’76). It’s basically about the “Trans-America Grand Prix”, an illegal race held every year between Los Angeles (Santa Monica Pier) and New York City.

Wikipedia lists the following celebrity cameos: Joe Dante as “Kid”, Allan Arkush as “Panama”, Jonathan Kaplan as “All-Night Gas Station Attendant”, Roger Corman as “Los Angeles County District Attorney”, Don Simpson as “L.A. County Assistant District Attorney”, Martin Scorsese as “Mafioso #1” and Sylvester Stallone as “Mafioso #2.”

Sometime down the road an enterprising playwright is going to write a one-act play titled “The Persecution and Assassination of Richard Dreyfuss as Performed by Social Media Harridans Who Recoiled at Unseemly, Anti-Woke Bluster During a Cabot Theater Appearance in Beverly, Massachusetts.”

It happened last weekend, and it won’t go away.

We all understand that Dreyfuss is an irate anti-wokester, given his occasional take-it-or-leave-it viewpoints that read in some circles as sexist or transphobic. He’s previously expressed alarm over the 2024 inclusion mandates and the teaching of wokester theology in public schools.

Social media pearl-clutchers claimed Dreyfuss was repeatedly guilty of wrongthink during the Cabot appearance, disparaging the #MeToo movement and ranting about how we “shouldn’t be listening to some 10 year old who says they want to be a boy instead of a girl.”

Near the end of the Cabot show, which had been billed as a Jaws screening event plus a mild-mannered, anecdotal Dreyfuss q & a, the 76-year-old actor complained that “fifty years ago and without telling anybody they took civics out of the curriculum at public schools in America.

“We have no knowledge of who the hell we are and if we don’t get it back soon we’re all gonna die. We have to make sure that your kids are not the last generation of Americans, and you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Except Dreyfuss’s quirky manner has been leaving a stronger impression that what he actually said. Last night an attorney friend messaged me about Dreyfuss’s erratic appearance — “senility or alcohol?” This morning an industry pro wrote “what’s going on with Richard Dreyfuss? Acting strangely. Has gauze pads or something on back of both hands. Medical problems? Prescription drugs affecting him?”

Dreyfuss needs to release a statement that clarifies what he meant, and needs to do so with concise, thought-through, well-honed language. He needs to make it clear that he’s in full possession of his faculties. Not a difficult thing — just do it.

Posted on 7.3.11: “I saw Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life for the second time last night, and it’s still a gentle, layered, highly undisciplined cosmic church-service movie — a quiet spiritual environment to dream inside of and meditate by. But (and I’m sorry to say this in a way) it doesn’t gain with a second viewing. And all very good or great movies tend to do this. So what’s wrong?

“I was made fun of on 5.22 by New York‘s “Approval Matrix” guy for tweeting from Cannes that I was glad I’d seen The Tree of Life but I’m “not sure if I’ll buy/get the Bluray.” Now that I’ve seen it twice I know I won’t bring the Bluray home. In other words I immediately sensed it wasn’t a two-timer in Cannes and now the proof is in the pudding, so I would say my premonitions have merit.

“For me, The Tree of Life is an amazing film in the sense that it gathers and swirls it all together in the same way that I myself swirl it all together ever day, soaking in my blender shake of childhood memories, present-day ennui, seaside dreams, forest-primeval dreams and dinosaur dreams, catch-as-catch-can impressions and endless variations and meditations about loss and lament and the absence of grace, etc. That plus ‘fuck me because it sure could have been a happier life if it hadn’t been for my gruff, largely unaffectionate, World War II-generation dad who brought darkness and snippiness too many times to the dinner table,’ etc.

“I’m always disengaging from the present and wandering around in the past and thinking about a constant stream of recolections…dinosaurs and Dean Martin,Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin and cap guns and girls in bikinis on beaches and how my mother looked and sounded when she was young, and how sometimes I used to argue with myself about who was worse, she or my father.

“All I know is that except for movie-watching and running around with friends, my childhood was a Soviet prison-camp experience — a spiritual gulag. My parents and the public schools I attended may have made me into a tougher, more resourceful survivor than if they’d been ‘nicer’ and easier on me, but God, what a price.

“I’m presuming it’s not just me who takes this head-trip all the time, but each and every person on the planet. Malick is merely taking a grab-bag of his own lamentings and assembling them into a film. That — don’t get me wrong — is a very welcome thing. I’m immensely grateful that a film as nourishing and open-pored as The Tree of Life is playing in the same plex alongside Transformers 3 (a film that gives you no room whatsoever to trip out).

“But I’m not convinced that what Malick has done is all that staggering or transcendent or worth the kind of in-depth explanation piece that Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz has written, which reminds me of the sermons that Episcopalian ministers used to deliver when they tried to explain what God and Jesus could or should mean to the average parishioner (i.e., myself).

“I used to quietly groan to myself during these sermons, and then I took LSD when I was 19 and I finally did see God and Jesus, and I realized what tepid and cautious fellows those ministers were.”

They’re not part of the American cultural bloodstream like they used to be…of course not! The idea of movies being a communal “attending a church service” thing has been steadily weakening for roughly two decades, maybe a bit less. By my own specific yardstick they’ve been losing their cultural mojo since at least the mid to late aughts. I’ve long believed that the beginning of the degradation began with the debut of Iron Man, but that’s me.

I personally blame Millennials, Zoomers, streaming and the pandemic, although not necessarily in that order. These are the four bugaboos, man…the four horseman of the cinematic apocalypse.

This guy is saying what I’ve been muttering to myself for many, many years. It’s like he’s mouthing some interior mantra, played or spoken over and over….the story of my life since 2010 or thereabouts.

Knowing my Millennial sons’ aversion to monochrome films from an early age, I’ve long presumed that Sutton, age 2 and 1/2, would never consider watching any black-and-white movies, classic or otherwise.

Hence my surprise on Sunday when we watched about a half-hour’s worth of the original King Kong (’33), which she was pretty much enthralled by. It was the first time Sutton and I had absorbed a critically approved, historically important movie together. Quite a moment.

Sutton’s basic tastes run to stuff like Bluey and animation, etc. Then again she’s watched The Wizard of Oz, sepia footage and all, so she’s already gotten her feet wet in that regard.

She and Jett had been watching Kong: Skull Island (’17), which is basically (we’ve all endured it) an empty crappo CG-propelled Super-Kong flick.

I asked Jett if she’d ever seen the original, and he flipped it on. We both presumed Sutton would be bored if we started from the beginning as the first 35 or 40 minutes are pure dialogue and set-up, so we went straight to the native sacrifice scene.

I offered no coaching or commentary except in one instance. I explained to Sutton that Kong loves Fay Wray‘s Ann Darrow, and that while she’s very scared by his size and whatnot he’ll never hurt her, that he only wants to care for and protect her.

Alas, harumphy HE commenter “bentrane” disapproved. He asked if I “really think King Kong is suitable for a two-year-old,” blah blah.

HE response: “King Kong is epic and historic and iconic — a film that’s emotional and tragically sad and unmistakably about unrequited love. In short, it’s a human-scaled movie about serious feelings, and one that reflects certain emotional realities, unlike the bullshit super-Kong films of the last decade or so, which are merely about size, spectacle and jizzy CG…basically garbage.

“What you seem to be saying is that the crap-bullshit Kong films and their ruthless super-violence (along with the Godzilla–Kaiju films) are okay in a common-gruel, eye-candy sense because they’re empty cartoons but an exciting, 90 year-old adventure-spectacle that touches upon serious human behaviors and tragic sadnesses (including cruelty to animals, greed, delusional dreams of glory) should be kept away from little kids.”

HE commenter “riboleh”: “There is a realistic depiction (albeit stop-motion) of Kong ripping open a dinosaur’s jaw. It’s quite violent, and I would suggest you reconsider creating nightmares for her. It’s so obviously not akin to today’s empty spectacle CGI, not because of how it looks, but how it plays…which feels quite real, and certainly to a two-year old.”

My bottom-line feeling is that King Kong is, at the end of the day, a nutritious film, and that today’s entertainment fare, especially the kind aimed at tykes, is wafer-thin and informed by banal sugary sentiment — pretty much dedicated to eliminating nutrition at all costs.

I figured that exposing Sutton to nutritious content on a brief, one-time basis is worth the risk, as she’s unlikely to see any quality films for quite a few years.